Barack Obama swept into the Presidency promising a new political order, one characterized by “transparency” and “openness.” Three years later, the President’s lofty campaign promises are belied by the Environmental Protection Agency’s record of suppression.
Federal agencies cannot issue regulations willy-nilly; rather, they are bound to rules stipulating administrative procedure, in order to ensure the voice of affected parties is heard. Obama’s EPA, however, evinces a troubling tendency to circumvent these procedural rules. Regulated entities are being subjected to controversial, onerous regimes, before they even have the opportunity to read the rules, much less voice an objection. The wayward Agency is exercising an unanswerable power, straight out of a Kafka novella.
Last week on Fox News Channel’s Your World with Cavuto, my colleague Chris Horner discussed the Environmental Protection Agency’s “environmental justice” grants. Horner’s thesis is that these grants are used to “teach people to oppose economic activity in the areas where they most need economic activity.” See the whole segment:
Last week in California, a federal district court invalidated the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, a requirement that upstream producers of transportation fuel (i.e., refineries and distributors) reduce the carbon intensity of gasoline sold in the state. Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger imposed the LCFS in 2007, by executive order. The regulation accounts for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions reductions California is relying on to achieve the climate change goals of the state’s 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, which Schwarzenegger championed.
Judge Lawrence O’Neill determined that the LCFS violated the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, because it effectively regulated interstate commerce to the detriment of some states. The plaintiffs were farmers and ethanol groups, who stood to lose market-share to Brazilian ethanol producers due to the fact that Brazil’s sugar-cane ethanol is less carbon intensive than American corn ethanol. Judge O’Neil allowed for the State to immediately appeal to the 9th federal Circuit Court of Appeals.
A day after the court’s decision, my colleague Myron Ebell was invited on Fox Business’s Cavuto show to discuss the issue. Video of his appearance is below.
There’s a big lie making the rounds that EPA’s ultra-expensive new mercury regulation is worth the cost ($10 billion annually) because it will protect fetuses from developmental disorders.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is the most prominent perpetrator of the mercury lie. Recently, she gave a pep talk to a group of collegian environmental activists trying to shut down campus coal fired power plants, during which she said:
“It’s so important that your voices be heard, that campuses that are supposed to be teaching people aren’t meanwhile polluting the surrounding community with mercury and costing the children a few IQ points because of the need to generate power. It’s simply not fair.”
Over at Think Progress Green, Brad Johnson does his part to spread mercury disinformation, by pooh-poohing Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Kentucky) for having claimed (correctly) that the mercury rule won’t have any benefit for babies and pregnant women. According to Johnson,
“The glimmer of fact in Whitfield’s claims is that the health costs of mercury poisoning of our nation’s children over decades of unlimited coal pollution are difficult to quantify. Mercury poisoning is rarely fatal and hard to detect, but causes undeniable, insidious developmental harm to fetuses and babies.”
Naturally, environmentalist special interests are the worst propagators of this mercury mendacity. The day that EPA Administrator announced the final mercury rule, Sierra Club launched a television advertisement depicting a little girl learning to ride a bike, while a voiceover states:
“When this little girl grows up her world will have significantly less mercury pollution because President Obama and the EPA stood up against polluters and established the first-ever clean air standards. This action means that our air, water, and food will be safer from mercury pollution and heavy metals generated by coal-fired power plants. Like you, President Obama understands that reducing toxic mercury pollution increases the possibilities to dream big.”
Global atmospheric mercury might or might not be a problem—I don’t know. But I do know that mercury emissions from U.S. coal fired plants pose a negligible danger to fetuses. And I know this because EPA told me so.
On the first day of 2012, the New York Times published an editorial, “Where the Real Jobs Are,” that is uniformly backwards. If the federal government did the exact opposite of every recommendation made by the New York Times editorial board, Americans would benefit the most.
According to the Times, President Barack Obama should reject the shovel-ready Keystone XL Pipeline, because it would carry “conventional” oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast. The editorial board then suggests that “real” jobs are those in the sector of the economy responsible for the production of “alternative” energy, like wind and solar power. Instead of allowing the private sector to create 6,000 (presumably fake) jobs by permitting the Keystone XL, the Times argues that the President should “lay out the case that industry, with government help, can create hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs.” In the Times’s mind, Europe has shown the way:
“Europe has encouraged the commercial development of carbon-reducing technologies with a robust mix of direct government investment and tax breaks, loans and laws that cap or tax greenhouse gas emissions. This country needs a comparably broad strategy that will create a pathway from the fossil fuels of today to the greener fuels of tomorrow.”
Two nights ago, I was invited to speak on Fox Business Channel’s Cavuto show, about renewable energy subsidies. To find out whether I am for or against taxpayer handouts to politically favored industries, watch the video below.
I’ve spent much of the last five months following (and fighting) the Environmental Protection Agency’s power grab on visibility policy. As I explain here, EPA is hybridizing disparate provisions of the Clean Air Act in order to engineer greater regulatory authority for itself. The Agency is using this trumped up authority to run roughshod over state decision making on policy to improve visibility.
At issue is a provision amended to the Clean Air Act in 1977, known as Regional Haze, that requires measures to improve vistas at federal National Parks and Wilderness Areas. A hallmark of the program is state primacy over EPA. The Congressional Record for the 1977 Clean Air Act amendments explains that the House of Representatives and Senate passed markedly different Regional Haze provisions. The House’s version gave EPA primacy; the Senate version made states the lead decision-makers. The Conference Committee, whose duty it is to reconcile the differences between the bills passed by the two chambers of Congress, adopted the Senate language. In the seminal case American Corn Growers v. EPA, a federal court remanded EPA’s proposed Regional Haze rule, because it insufficiently accorded states the lead role in policymaking to improve visibility. EPA’s own rules recognize the Agency’s secondary role. According to the preamble of EPA’s 2005 Regional Haze Guidelines, “…the [Clean Air] Act and legislative history indicate that Congress evinced a special concern with ensuring that States would be the decision makers (70 FR 39137).”
The legal and regulatory record is clear: States get to make visibility policy.
Fast forward to January 2009: President Barack Obama takes office, and launches a war on coal. On the supply-side, the administration moves to end surface coal mining in Appalachia. On the demand side, the administration is trying to force every existing coal fired power plant to install the most expensive controls—namely “selective catalytic reduction” systems for nitrogen oxides, “scrubbers” for sulfur dioxide, and electrostatic filters for particulate matter—regardless whether these retrofits are warranted. For the average 500 megawatt coal fired power plant, costs of these controls range anywhere from $400 o $600 million. Presumably, EPA’s idea is to raise the price of generating electricity with coal, and thereby “bankrupt” the industry, to borrow a term turned by the President.
In a recent blog, I explained how the Environmental Protection Agency is hybridizing disparate provisions of the Clean Air Act in order to engineer greater regulatory authority for itself. EPA is using these “Franken-regs” to trump the states’ rightful authority on visibility improvement policy and impose billions of dollars of emissions controls for benefits that are literally invisible.
Yesterday, for example, EPA relied on this hybrid authority to impose a federal regulatory plan on Oklahoma over the Sooner State’s objection. (A copy of the federal register notice is available here). In February, Oklahoma submitted a visibility improvement plan that would require fuel switching from coal to natural gas at six power plants by 2022, but EPA rejected this approach in March. In its stead, EPA proposed a federal plan that would require almost $2 billion in emissions controls, in addition to fuel switching. EPA’s proposed plan was finalized yesterday.
Although the Clean Air Act clearly gives states primacy over EPA in decision-making for visibility improvement, Oklahoma is one of three states subject to a federal plan. In August, EPA imposed a plan on New Mexico that costs $740 million more than the state’s plan. In September, EPA proposed a federal plan for North Dakota. All three states are challenging EPA in federal court.
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